‘A Season In The Sun: The Rise Of Mickey Mantle’ Focuses On One Pivotal Year For America And Baseball

MLB’s Opening Day is Thursday, and as the new-look New York Yankees take the field at the Rogers Centre, all eyes will be on their prodigious sluggers, Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton, two 20-something superstars with much to prove during the 2018 season. The hype and hot takes that have surrounded them over the last few months are not unusual. They wear pinstripes. But their 2018 story should remind us of another Yankees masher who hit just as many tape-measure home runs as No. 99 and No. 27 and had also lot to prove in a season that took place over 60 years ago — No. 7, Mickey Mantle.

Mantle was born to swing a bat. Just like Judge and Stanton, the sky was the limit for the golden boy with the chiseled physique from rural Commerce, Oklahoma. But it took Mantle a while to rise to expectations.

This week, co-authors Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith present a different angle on Mantle’s early major league journey with the release of their new book A Season in the Sun: The Rise of Mickey Mantle (Basic Books). Roberts and Smith believe that to truly understand the man and the ballplayer, they must return Mantle to the 1950s “when he became the most celebrated athlete in the country and reigned as king of the National Pastime.” To Roberts and Smith, too many biographers and sports writers rush to present Mantle as he we now know him, a tragic hero and future alcoholic, ignoring the man he was pictured by every man, woman and child alive in 1956 as “an American colossus, [who] personified and fulfilled the country’s most fervent desires.” In short, a true hero.

1956 was just one of the 18 Major League seasons in a Hall of Fame career. It was one of the great seasons in baseball history, and the focus of A Season in the Sun, a literary time capsule for when “The Mick” was as culturally relevant as Ike, Sinatra, or Elvis. Maybe more so.

Mantle’s early years with the Yankees (1951-1955) were marked by the death of his father, Mutt, injury, immaturity, and insecurity in the shadow of incredibly high expectations. And failure. When it seemed like he wasn’t going to be “the next Babe Ruth” or “the next Ted Williams” in his first few seasons, he was thought to be a lost cause — that he lacked both character and ambition. That he was buckling under the pressure, shrinking away from the ghosts of Yankees past. It got so bad that during the 1955 season, Mantle was serenaded by a chorus of boos in Yankee Stadium. Yes, the great Mickey Mantle was booed. At Yankee Stadium.